58 entries from October 2012

October 31, 2012

Leonardo wrote backwards and from right to left, Benjamin Button lived backwards at the hands of Scott Fitzgerald, Rene Magritte's man in the bowler saw the back of his head, Herrimann's Ignatz the Mouse I am sure saw the back of his head looking around the world with the world's most powerful telescope, rugby passes are all done backwards, paper images of vue optiques appear backwards, lightning for all intents and purposes starts backwards from the ground up, reverse mathematics are worked from theorems to axioms, and the Chicago River (1900) was engineered to flow backwards for the foreseeable future, while the Mississippi River famously flowed backwards for just a bit in the New Madrid Earthquake of 1812.

I can only imagine what audiences must have felt when they saw the first moving pictures played backwards--seeing them played forwards was a novel-enough (and revolutionary) idea, but the simple idea of reversing the direction of the film would have proved to be equally fascinating.

Imagine the first time you witnessed a staged train wreck on film, back there in 1897, and imagine being able to see it played over and over again, until you were filled. I'm not so sure that there were even any still photographs of a train wreck as it occurred to this point, even with advances in film speed and lens, so seeing the even unfold in front of you at leisure must have been overwhelming. Now imagine these same folks seeing the event and watching the locomotives reconstitute themselves. It would have been an extraordinary event. Even observing the Etienne Marey sequences and seeing what actually happens when a person bends over to pick up a pail of water would have revealed almost as much in new detail as when Galileo was in the middle of his earliest observations.

Looking at things backwards is a good idea so far as thinking about engineering problems and of course in checking experimental results in the sciences--its not so good an idea though to change the results produced by the scientific method because they're not a good intuitive fit to expected parameters.

Such was the cased with the first (and successful) employment of a computer to predict the outcome of a presidential election. THe computer was the UNIVAC (the world's first commercial computer and a blazingly fast machine at 10k operations a second, nearly six orders of magnitude lower than "superfast" by contemporary standards), which was brought in by Remington Rand to CBS News to crunch the numbers on the tight race between General Dwight Eisenhower and Gov. Adlai Stevenson (II) on 4 November 1952. (Stevenson was the son of a former U.S. Vice President and would run again against Eisenhower in 1956.) Pioneers Pres Eckert and John Mauchley, along with Max Woodbury (and programmer Harold Sweeney, who is seated at the UNIVAC's control panel and who seems never to be mentioned in the iconic photo at top, with Eckert at center and anchorman Walter Cronkite at left). CBS News Chief Sig Mickelson and Cronkite were not comfortable with the proposal, but ran with it anyway, sensing a moment of the-future-is-now.

The Eisenhower/Stevenson race was seen by the large majority of pundits to be too close to call, so when the UNIVAC's results pointed to a landslide for Eisenhower (438 electoral votes and 43 states to Stevenson with 93 electoral votes and 5 states) folks got very sweaty and nervous, not trusting the outcome. As this was still a very early age in human-machine interaction, and the computed results fell far away from perception and expected response, changes were made in the UNIVAC's programming to determine a more "reasonable" response by the machine, the new results making the race very tight and fitting human expectations and giving Eisenhower a very slim margin of victory. As poll results started to sweep in an hour or so later indicating that Eisenhower was showing with a huge victory, the UNIVAC was again reprogrammed and at about midnight the announcement was made that the UNIVAC had indeed been correct in the first place. The final results were 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. In the next presidential election in 1956 the three networks all had computers working for them--with them--and a different perception had been formed on working with computers.

October 30, 2012

In my experience with images in silhouette, the technical adaptations are very unusual (at least for things that are not spotter guides for enemy aircraft or ships-at-night)--more uncommon still are industrial buildings rendered in silhouette. But here's an example, taken from the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) for 1936. These are factories in the Feldmuehle Papier- und Zellstoffwerke company, and are really quite attractive.

The following two images are details from the 14th silhouette, at bottom-center:

October 28, 2012

Images of Hell do not often appear graphically depicted right on the title page of books, even though books speaking to Hell and warning us of its coming number in the hundreds of thousands, if not more, particularly if you interpret religion as the means for keeping people away from the ring of fire. Few people are shy about depicting Hell in general, though there evidently is some reluctance (or forbearance, or oversight) to showing it front-and-center on the title pages of books.

A terrific exception to this rule is Jacobs de Voragine’s Passional, Hyr hewrrey sick an dath winter deel, printed in Basel in 1511, and illustrated by various and unidentified Strassburg woodcut masters. In this extraordinary title page we see the vision of the adoration of the Virgin Mother and child supported in a rose of light, aided by guiding winds and various floating saints, and shown lowering the holy book directly to the city of Strassburg. In either corner positioned above the temporal city and below the firmament are two visions of hell, one less vicious and the other more so: to the left we see some of the pious praying for better judgment as they are about to be consumed by the background flames, while to the right is a far more ambitious and morbid vision of hell featuring the famous Hellmouth. The Hellmouth makes appears all throughout the history of art (as we can see in this Brueghel painting, for example), but it is a little curious that, outside of the mention of Leviathan (translated from Hebrew, Job 41:1), Hellmouth (as the entrance to hell) doesn’t make an appearance in the Bible.

What is more easily found, at least in the artwork on title pages throughout the Renaissance and the Baroque, are images of people about to be sent to hell. A good and chilling example of this can be seen in the artwork for Thomas Murner (1475-1537) De quattor heresiarhis ordinis Praedicatorium de Observantis nuncupatorum…, printed (again) at Strassburg in 1509. The pamphlet tells the story of Johannes Jetzer and his accomplices (including four monks) who were tried (under torture) for blasphemy after it was revealed that they colluded to defraud people with a bogus story of religious visions, employing the bloody tear of Mary. All were found guilty and the four monks were burned alive at the stake—Jetzer having escaped—and sent immediately to the deeper, more fiery, pit.

This isn't quite showing the coming of hell as in the first case, but it is getting close. In any event, I found it interesting to see the depiction of the Bad Place right there on the title page of the Murner bokk.

October 27, 2012

Samuel Johnson and Ambrose Bierce compiled dictionaries--two different types, two different efforts, 150 years apart. Some think of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as being the first of the English language, but it is hardly so, being a sort-of late-comer, 150 years after the first English dictionary appeared. Of course Johnson's was the first bona fide "professional;" dictionary, against which all others are to be measured. 2000+ pages long, Johnson's effort is also a type of historico-novel-dictionary (Histovelary?)--he inserted histories of words, applications, and a tremendous amount of his own bias. (For example, his famous definition of "lexicographer: : a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in
tracing the original and detailing the signification of words".) The book sometimes reads like a novel--or at least, I think that a person could force a novel out of it, and not simply because the book has all of the parts of a novel scattered about. It is an odd book, maybe the only of its kind, a disciplined and airy encyclopedic romp through the history of words and ideas, all presented by a compiler who was also its author--and accomplished pretty much on his won.

Where Johnson wrote with some fair immoderation of bias, Ambrose Bierce wrote with nothing but bias. His work, The Devil's Dictionary (1911), is a work of deep observation and scathing wit. It stands as a dictionary of a personal philosophy more than anything else, written by an acerbic iconoclast of cunning and skepticism. Comparing definitions of the two side-by-side is an interesting exercise, if for no other reason than it is good and unexpected reading. Bitter Bierce was a wonderful writer with a sharp and jaundicy eye that saw the third side of a two-sided thing, and applied that sight to his unexpected masterwork.

So over the next bit we'll alphabetically grze through selections of the two works, comparing interesting words.

A: Artist/art

Johnson

ARTISAN s. an artist, an inferiour. Manufacturer, low tradesman.

ARTIST, s. a professor of an art, a skilful man.

ARTLESS a. unskilful, without art or fraud.

ARTLESSLY, ad. without art, naturally.

Bierce

ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.

One day a wag -- what would the wretch be at? -- Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! Straight arose Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows, And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns, And disputations dire that lamed their limbs) To serve his temple and maintain the fires, Expound the law, manipulate the wires. Amazed, the populace that rites attend, Believe whate'er they cannot comprehend, And, inly edified to learn that two Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do) Have sweeter values and a grace more fit Than Nature's hairs that never have been split, Bring cates and wines for sacrificial feasts, And sell their garments to support the priests.

October 24, 2012

I have read and seen my share of quack advertisements, eletro-luxurious machines to cure gouty embolisms, powdery powders that cure powder and things like power, cocaine bibs for infants, radium suppositories that will work to help make you "regular", grease baths to make you fertile, electric chairs with special devices for the "sensitive organ" to deliver small dosages of electricity to do g_d-knows-what,and so on, as these mostly-knowing shyster/huckster productions fade into the cold black sea.

[Sere here for a short post on this blog, "The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Radium Suppositories"]

But tonight I've read an absolutely lovely concoction for ready-made remedies, one of the best--if not the most entirely best--ever. All brought to me via the insistence of our 9-year-old on reading Roald Dahl's George's Marvelous Medicine. George, you see, was a young boy anchored to a coarse oblivion by a witcherly grandmother, a venal, foul, bullying and hateful woman who gave George no end of mind-abuse when the parents were away. And so it came to be the day that George was to do something about Grandma.

What he did was to replace her special medicine with his own, marvelous, medicine. And feed it to her. And see what happened.

October 22, 2012

(For some reason I couldn't find a simple listing of Nobel Prize winners listed alphabetically--so here one is. This is linked to the Nobel site which of course has an exhaustive listing of winners and reasons for the award; this list is a simple thumbnail of the winners.)

Note: about halfway down is a descending list of recipients with the Nobel Foundation's reasons for the awards. All text in the descrption for the award is from the Nobel Foundation site. (This ends/begins in 1997--I'll get this up to date shortly.)

October 21, 2012

This print has been hanging here and there at home for many years--it has always been amusing, and somehow warming.

"A _M of A, and Dealer in Curiosities" was "published as the act directs 30 July 1839", is an etchign which depicts,
I guess, a lettered/educated man who winds up as a seller of scientific and intellectual bric-a-brac and interesting bits, perhaps wonderful natural history/physics materials, perhaps trivialities. He seems satisfied to me, regardless of the little man over his shoulder making a face, a reminder perhaps to not take the curiosities too seriously. [There's also another face off to the right, peering into the image (see below).]

The Record of Arts & Science that our dealer is reading has some interesting parts to it:, including something on new mechanical flight and a new diving bell--it would've been more interesting historically if it had mentioned the brand-new Daguerre invention.

This is one of those images in search of a story, and as it turns out the story is actually pretty long and involved. The image is this fantastic lithograph from Valentine's Manual of the City of New York (a sort of annual review/directory of the city that ran on-and-on from the 1850's to the 1920's), this one being from the 1868 edition.

It also is a very stark reminder about how we still deliver power and communication in the United States, still via insulated wires strung along cross beams on what are mostly dead trees--pretty much the way the business has been done for he last 160 year.s That the backbone of the American energy and communication grid is still transferred on wire/cable strung over the street and exposed to everything on cultivated and treated sticks from the forest is an irony that we live under every day, and that beginning with telegraph poles.

That said, I like this image because the pole n the picture is so curved. Perhaps it was the way the tree was; perhaps it was rendered that way when it was treated with creosote. I don't know. But the folks at Valentines liked it, otherwise they could have ignored its crookedness or used another angle on depicting the Old Halfway House.

Judging from many other examples, it seems that the artists at Valentines had a taste for the subtle and obscure. There are plenty of cases of the depiction of the quietly uncommon, as with another unusual image, showing Church street looking north and showing a long line of telegraph poles, all of which are squarely behind the other so that only the initial pole is visible, though you can see the cross-beams and insulators of the others, the brace getting "lower" and "smaller" behind the first pole. It is just extremely uncommon (in my experience) to see a long line of anything depicted in this way.

The artists/lithographers at The Manual seemed to enjoy their work. For example, in the above image in addition to teh lined-up telegraph poles we have some other very uncommon small elements. No doubt the view was true--which was the intent of the book, to accurately portray the city--but the small elements were creative, quiet and incisive. Perhaps it is also just exactly what the artist saw when the view was made. For example, the woman
crossing the street us stepping up on the curb and raising her skirts slightly--it would've been easier to just have her standing there, as with the gentleman immediately in front of her, but for some (creative) reason she is shown in an unusual pose. Ditto the guy leaning against the building at right--he's out of proportion with the other two figures, unless he was a giant, but he's just, well, leaning there. He's also standing next to a shutter, which is down and also leaning against the building. A peddler makes his/her way across the street in the background with a large cart. And the windows in the buildings are unequally decorated, with interior window dressings at different stages of being drawn and not, and with different treatment, and in different states of repair. In short, the image is really a snapshot.

I imagine that somewhere here in this country there could still original telegraph poles standing--the originals started out generally as chestnut, and then force treated with creosote, and were intended to stand for 50 to 100 years. Under favorable conditions in which they were just simply not replaced, it is conceivable that some could have lasted for 150 years.

October 20, 2012

This is a quick follow-up to an earlier post on Solomon Butcher in which there two two photographic images that are clearly "manufactured"--one is created in the darkroom (simply adding trees in a tress-less landscape), while the other (below) is an unlabelled recreation of an event. This is in the lines of Timothy O'Sullivan and Matthew Brady dressing up their images a bit by posing the dead or giving them added bits (like muskets and so on) to enliven the picture. This one though is entirely theatre--as it happens there are very few 19th century photographs depicting a crime-in-progress. Butcher just decided to show his audience what the crime probably looked like. In any event if not for a little Zoomology the scene could've perhaps passed for real.

This is a detail from the full-plate glass negative, printed out so:

Without the enlargement it is difficult to tell what sort of instruments the ranchers were holding. But up close the wire cutters are simply suggestions of that too, being made of wood and all.

I'm sure that Solomon Butcher's (see a post on him earlier today) lonely pictures of life in the great prairie lands of Nebraska were lonely just for an instant. The captured images of vast semi-rolling lands swallowing their subjects were only momentarily. I'm sure that once the photo as made, Ms Austin (below) simply mounted her horse and loped away towards the beautiful horizon, enjoying the day. The lonesomeness I'm fairly well certain was a creation of the moment. Except in winter, when the lonesomeness was real. (All images live at the interesting Nebraska State Historical archives, here.)

Sadie Austin, "the best known cowgirl in Cherry County". ("...the daughter of Cherry County rancher Charles
Austin, was a woman of many talents. She was well educated and
noted for her refinement, including her accomplishments as a
pianist. But, when needed, she was also able to put on a split
skirt and help the cowhands. She could sit a horse well and was
noted for her shooting ability. She was the best known cowgirl
in Cherry County."

A different Ned--not Buntline, but Dunlap. Ned Dunlap. The caption said he ("foreman on the Watson Ranch near Kearney") was outfitted for a parade of Old Timers in 1902, and is done-up Old School cowboy.

This fantastic image of clarity and potential cold is a portrait of "John Bridges at Devil's Gap", and as the Nebraska Historical Society tells us, it was the site of a true-to-life 1878 hanging-and-burning, a low and dirty affair perpetuated by the Olive Gang. The Olives (I.P. and his brother Robert) were wanted men of Texas taken flight to Nebraska where at least I.P. did very well, coming into hi sown as a cattle rancher. In spite of wealth and land and luck in escaping prosecution and/or vengeance for murder in his former state, he was still highly exercised about losing some cattle to rustlers and had therefore taken a very dim view of Homesteaders in his (and adjoining) counties, fearing that they represented rustling risks as well. And so it came for him to loathe the existence of two homesteaders, Mitchell and Ketchum, who lived in tiny dwellings in this gigantic landscape. The Olives feared fear, no doubt, and after a while it became clear that the two men could not be scared away, and so the Olives set the legal machinery in motion, accusing the men of rustling, and stoking a $700 reward on their capture,which was quickly accomplished. Mitchell and Ketchum were brought in but then were taken by the Olives and their minions, who rode the men off to their ends. They were handcuffed together, ropes tied around their necks (not in a noose, but in a foul and ugly and very painful tied knot), and were hoisted up, one after the other. They were then burned like animals over a fire set at their feet. There was legal procedure against the Olives, but long story short is that I.P. soon won release of his second degree murder charge and lived with his son in Colorado, still in fear of reprisal, finally meeting vengeance in 1884. Its just a bad story.

Image near the Snake River, Cherry County, Nebraska: "Lookout Point". "This promontory in the near-mountainous sand hills of Cherry
County used to be covered with cedar trees, and was allegedly
a spot favored by horse thieves who could hide their booty in
the blowout at the top and shinny up a tree to keep a lookout
for the law. " Evidently, the rise was completely bare when Butcher came to it in the 1890's, finding not a tree on the site that the former horse thieves could hide behind. So, if you look (not even very) closely, it is clear that Mr. Butcher simply drew in the missing trees.

In another instance of re-creation, Butcher made a photo of ranch hands in the throes of destroying a barbwire fence. The fence would have belonged to a settler/homesteader, and represented nothing but a threat to the rancher's way of life. The parceling of land in such a manner, when in the years previous the country had been nothing but millions of acres of free-to-the-horizon's-next-horizon land, was a blasphemy to the rancher. But since making a photograph of a crime in progress was so rare and difficult (given the circumstances of, well, a crime being committed and the physical limitations of the photographic equipment), Butcher simply made the scene up, with wooden wire cutters and masks that no rancher or cowboy would wear.

1902 ANNALEN DER PHYSIK 8(8):798-814The thermodynamic theory
of the potential differences between metals and complete dissociation
solutions of their salts and a electrical method towards the probing of
molecular power

1902 ANNALEN DER PHYSIK 9(10):417-433Kinetic theory of the heat equilibrium and the second fundamental theorem of the thermodynamics

Changing the Mind's View of Simple and Complex Ideas via Different Image Perspectives

I’m always very interested in curious things, or standard, “average” things pictured in non-standard ways, as the
change in perspective can lead to entirely new observations and discovery. Seeing this illustration in an article by J. Norman Lockyer (Nature 1881) I was shocked by its clarity and usefulness—Lockyer was simply showing the arrangement of his apparatus for his solar spectrum experiments but the angle of observation (being at such an oblique angle as is normally found) was just, so, well, “correct”. The image I thought was perfect for the reader—not only that, it was designed artistically and with grace, and one can see exactly what Lockyer was up to. Diagrams would’ve worked almost as well, but there is just something so extraordinary here that you could just about work from the image if there was no description.

Looking at things differently is hard work—that’s why I think it is always good to refresh the neuronal sap and look at great examples of unusual , insightful imagery.

Sometimes it works to read the description of what the image is before actually viewing it to see the differences of the image that you form in your brain before seeing the thing itself. For example, when reading about the Dogon, a cliff-dwelling people of the plateau of Bandiagara, south of Tombouctou, and how they would make houses and then towns out of the rocks fallen from cliffs, you get what is probably a pretty benign image. When you see photographs of these structures it seems as though the brain just simply isn’t ready for their impossible nature, though you quickly, instantly, recover (once you convince yourself the photo is real) and—voila—your mind has been expanded. (This photo is from an expansive work by Bernard Rudofsky, Architectures without Architects, Doubleday, 1964.)

The (internally) spectacular Etienne Boullee can greet us in the same way with some of his eye-popping architectural
creations (unbuilt architecture by an architect, in this case, compared to the built architecture of the non-architects above). Boullee’s “Plan du Cenotaphe de Newton”, a gigantic memorial to Newton that was dancing with necessary privacy in Boullee’s brain during the French Revolution (and also during a particularly un-Newtonesque time in on-your-knees-to-Cartesian-principles France) is another superior example. Reading the description of the structure just doesn’t quite do, and it seems whatever grand comes of that is tarnished and stripped away by the obesely florid sentiment of none other than Ledoux’s poetic sentiments “…O Newton! Sublime Mind! Vast and profound genius! I conceived the idea of surrounding thee with
thy discovery…”. Oy. Boulle adds to this inspirational atrocity by saying of the sphere: “…we must speak of a grace that owes its being to an outline that is as soft and flowing as it is possible to imagine…” And once the demand of “oh dear god just please show me the picture” is met, we are left with a turned-around brain and another heavenly exaltation, or profanity. The Cenotaph is just Grand-Canyon-Spectacular.

Complex can turn on the simple in this way, where we can have those “a-ha” moments from, say, early efforts at picturing the fourth dimension or non-Euclidean geometry to a new perspective of looking at Roman ruins. The arrival on the non-Euclidean geometries in the 19th century posed new issues, not the least of which was representing the ideas. Our saintly Hermann von Helmholtz believed –contrary to most elevated opinions—that the human mind could indeed intuit complex space and figures of these geometries. (The difficulty not only from the obvious intellectual hardships in picturing the concepts but also because the geometry of Lobachevsky http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Lobachevsky.html was called somewhat into doubt when some of its results were cast in doubt by contemporary astronomical observations.—and this even though so far as the great Gauss was concerned there was no deviation in Euclidean values.) Helmholtz did this by employing the three-dimensional pseudosphere model of Beltrami. (Reluctance to these ideas would end soon enough, for, as Linda Dalrymple Henderson points out with such sotto voce, “the convenience of Euclidean geometry would prove inadequate once Einstein” hit in 1905.)

The work of Beltrami and H.P. Manning (Geometry of Four Dimensions, 1914), and Jouffret (Traite elementaire de geometrie a quarte dimensions, Paris 1903) in illustrating these complex ideas (the titles of which were in themselves daungting as with Jouffret’s “plane projections of the sixteen fundamental octahedrons of an ikosatettrhroid”) would in themselves prove to be entirely irresistible to the world of the arts. Charles Howard and Maurice Princet I think had as much to do with the creation of cubism and abstract art and the imaging of time than anyone, including the painter (I shudder to say his name) of Les Demoiselles (1907) or the lovely Georges Braque (Houses at Estaque, 1908) or Jean Metzinger or even the sublime comedian Duchamp’s Nude Descending(1914). The hypercube starts to show up a lot in some Bauhaus genres and even into the palette of Frank Lloyd (“Stinky”) Wright (with his St. Mark’s Tower plan, NYC, 1929). I can only imagine the shock to the brains of these creative geniuses in seeing the display of such a novel idea. (For the ultimate treatise on this see Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton 1983). And no the art didn’t come first.

But coming back to the simple, and in the same frame as the first example that we mentioned in Lockyer, we have the unlikely find of Giovanni Piranesi. In my opinion his most spectacular work is found in his frammeni (the diverse bits and pieces of architectural and sculptural bric-a-brac found objects that are collected together on one stage) and in his archaeological detail. His attention to new perspective in showing the crucial aspects of structure and building in Rome is tremendous and
unexpected—as an example we see here the child’s-eye-height view of three steps of the reconstruction of the theatre of Pompey. I must say that I’ve seen a lot of architectural images in my time but nothing quite comes to me so surprisingly as this step-level view of the reconstruction of a Roman theatre, This happens throughout the lesser-known Piranesi, with great details of tools, and cross sections of the very deep
footings of bridges, and so on. It is really refreshing, lovely, unexpected work.

We’ll return to this subject from time to time as I have hundreds of interesting examples to draw from—for example, the remarkable Emily Vanderpoel’s Colour Problems (which has surfaced in this blog from time to time) which is ostensibly an undecipherable attempt to quantify color arrangement in art but through the lovely examples displaying this attempt pre-date the modern re-invention of non-representational art by at least a dozen years. Stay tuned!

This is a simple tally of American patent numbers and the years in which they appeared. I've found this list handy from time to time and thought to repost it here. It is a lot easier to have this series posted here than have to wrangle he data out of the occasionally labyrinthine U.S.P.T.O.: